2015/10/27 by Alex Townsend, Townsend, Alex, Heather Wilber +3 · 1 citation
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Engineering · #Advanced Numerical Analysis Techniques #FOS: Mathematics #Geological Modeling and Analysis #Numerical Analysis (math.NA)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1510.08094
openalex publication_date 2015/10/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
A collection of algorithms is described for numerically computing with smooth functions defined on the unit sphere. Functions are approximated to essentially machine precision by using a structure-preserving iterative variant of Gaussian elimination together with the double Fourier sphere method. We show that this procedure allows for stable differentiation, reduces the oversampling of functions near the poles, and converges for certain analytic functions. Operations such as function evaluation, differentiation, and integration are particularly efficient and can be computed by essentially one-dimensional algorithms. A highlight is an optimal complexity direct solver for Poisson's equation on the sphere using a spectral method. Without parallelization, we solve Poisson's equation with 100 million degrees of freedom in one minute on a standard laptop. Numerical results are presented throughout. In a companion paper (part II) we extend the ideas presented here to computing with functions on the disk.